[serious] Why is Lemmy community generaly against AI?
I noticed almost everybody here agrees that all AI is bad, and anything produced by AI is slop. and refuse to use any software made in part or in whole with AI or help of AI? Please mention your background and usage of AI with your answer.
46 replies
I work in software. Just in day to day:
Broadly:
Because it got enshittified and politicized by Tech Bros.
If you wanna tell me about the usefulness of LLMs, you are preaching to the choir. I was playing with GTP-J 6B finetunes in 2022. I am quantizing some weights as I type.
However, you can’t look at me with a straight face and tell me everything is okay in this space. It’s a nightmare, a giant scam that is going to implode.
As Lemmy is a refuge for people who see how caustic mainstream social media is, folks here are particularly sensitive to the issues surrounding “AI” too.
In other words, Lemmy literally selects for enshittification sensitivity.
There are a lot of software developers on Lemmy.
AI is being pushed as a software development tool. It tends to remove the fun part of our jobs (coding, debugging, optimizing) and relegates us to the shitty parts (code review).
We don't like that.
Personally I find I'm able to focus on high level design problems which I enjoy a lot. I still enjoy crafting elegant solutions to unique problems, but at least in my current job, most code is trivial and feels tedious to write by hand. Also, LLMs generate better code than some of my coworkers. Most of the slop I've had to deal with this year is in 20+ y/o codebases, and none of it was generated by LLMs.
Several legal, environmental and social reasons I can tell
I agree with you on the environmental and social reasons. The impact here is important. But what about the second part of the question, the usefulness and correct productive usage?
For many people, the cons outweigh the pros, and therefore they can't even consider them as pros at all.
Yes, this is what I start to understand here from the comments. Most people commenting here signify they care more about the resource usage and impact it has on the world and us rather than its actual output.
What other way would you look at it after weighing the pros and cons ?
I'm disabled and used to make book covers for indie authors. Now everybody uses AI for that and I can't find another job.
Most lemmy users live in countries which are run for a rich few, rather than the general public. Technology, including AI, is also used to benefit the rich, often at the cost of the rest of the population. Unfortunately this leads to people hating the technology rather than the political system.
There was a recent survey where they pointed out how people in English-speaking countries are most concerned about AI (because it is used against the people there) while people in the Global South are most positive about it (because it is used to benefit them). Here's the summary chart:-
yeah no, this is weird framing. i'm south korean myself and from what i feel it's not much (if any) different from what i see around the western internet
Hmm yes South Korea isn't a Global South country. It's closer to Western countries in terms of politics and economic situation.
Btw is there an age-based or rural-urban division in perception of AI?
rural-urban division: don't think so. even rural areas are pretty urbanized(?) and there isn't that much of a cultural? difference overall
age-based: i think yes, not much different from other countries. older people not being able to tell ai image/videos for example.
It's because we are adults, so we already have better skills than a general LLM. We learned to read, write, and research in school. While I personally didn't go to art school, many people did, and they developed skills that allow them to make better art than a general use art AI.
To us, AI is just wasting our time, because it does what we can already do but worse.
Children are in an unfortunate trap, where they need to spend years producing work that is worse than the LLM to eventually be able to develop the skillset to surpass the LLM. Buying into the idea that it makes your work faster or easier is a trap. You'll be permanently dependent on it.
Can you read a thousand pages of tech documentation and find every reference that could be relevant to the issue you're having in minutes? Then no, you don't always have 'better skills than a general LLM'. Humans are better at some things. Computers are better at some things. Use the right tool for the job.
It's funny you sent this just now. I just spent like 45 minutes trying to get Co-Counsel to make a list of all of the cases in a brief I'm working on. It got confused and couldn't. I would've been done by now if I just used my brain. /shrug
Are you using AI to help you with legal stuff? I don't think you should use AI for that since it would have data on rules from all sorts of places, and might not be up to date on laws in your place. Or you could train an AI on exclusively the data in your area, but then (1) you'd need hundreds of models, and (2) they would be much less powerful since the training data is a lot less.
CoCounsel is a professional legal service offered by WestLaw. WestLaw is one of the two major legal information companies. They were the ones who transitioned the law from books and brought it online in the 90s. Their dataset is exclusively their databases, which I would guess contain between 90-99% of all American Law ever written.
CoCounsel does exactly what you said in your earlier comment. It scans thousands of legal documents to find exactly what you’re looking for. If I want to find a case that talks about both the 4th amendment during a jurisdictional issue, it can instantly find a case with a a direct quote.
In this case, I asked it to do a multi-step process: find ~50 cases referenced in a specific document, alphabetize them, and add a two sentence summary below each one. That was too much for it to handle at once. It got confused.
In the US, each state can have its own laws, right? How does the AI handle this?
Also, how does it understand grammar? Wouldn't it first need to be trained on a large corpus of text?
I agree with you generally. However can you clarify please when you say "does what we can already do but worse". Can you please clarify ? What is your use of AI? Software development? Engineering? Architecture? Document editing? General usage and research? Paid and advanced models vs free or simple ones?
Because how you use it with give you a varying set of results.
Not OP and sorry you're getting downvoted when you're asking genuine questions and not trolling. Mileage varies with AI. Most people aren't paying for AI services, meaning that they only work with really dumb models. The people creating slop videos, vibe coding usable and useful apps, using AI to do legal stuff are paying AI companies for tokens or they have expensive GPUs with them. Many companies use AI for work and train general models for specific tasks in-house. They aren't using ChatGPT available to regular people. That's why AI content can range from slop videos to really good software patches.
The experience varies a lot depending how you use it. That is for sure. I don't k ow why some insist otherwise. However in this thread, most thoughtful answers disregard this because they consider a bigger issue with ethical and environmental impact it has.
Why do we need to justify our options? It is OK to not like a technology that is killing the world? A technology where we have movies of it taking over the world and murdering the human race. A technology that has yet to turn a profit despite trillions of dollars funnelled into it.
No, why don't you justify your want for destroying the planet and species.
It is antisocial and nihilistic technology that makes my hobbies worse and less accessable
It's unethical on so many fronts I'd assume you're a psychopath if you don't understand.
It's legitimately no different than cryptocurrency and NFTs, but this is the techbro scam that finally stuck after flinging shit against the wall over and over.
The training data sources are built destructively, without any consent from the artists, writers, programmers, anyone whose data is pulled into these models. The information these things spit out usually has so many inaccuracies - search engines are fucked, software is built without understanding a damn thing it actually does, poor translations of documentation are made public, the list goes on.
On top of that, data centers are one of the biggest environmental nightmares we've ever seen. Why are we pushing these so hard in the middle of a goddamn climate crisis?
There's genuinely not a single thing it actually does well, and the only reason it genuinely took off is because investors in the same 5 companies are patting each other on the back.
It's also worth mentioning how chatbots built off this stuff are designed to always be extraordinarily friendly and confirming to the user. It's such a massive factor contributing to AI psychosis, to the point that there people who legitimately believe these lines of code are sentient and conscious. Meanwhile we've already seen just how easily these closed source models can be tweaked to spit out pure propaganda, making them an extremely valuable political tool - it's no wonder fascists love this shit so much.
If the people building and hosting models won't build them from ethically sourced data and won't host them without disrupting or negatively impacting the communities they are hosted in (noise pollution, power and water rates increasing, layoffs, diesel generators, etc) then I won't use them and would advocate against their use.
I don't expect the tech to go away but you can make a hammer from stolen resources and use it to harm individuals and communities or you can build it from ethically sourced material and use it to build things people need. If there's an ethically sourced model quantized to run on commodity hardware locally without contributing to further wealth inequality, theft, and community disruption I won't have the same moral objections to using it as I would for any of the current corporate owned llms.
I agree with you on most part and value your reasonable response. However, before we can get AI to run ethically on commodity hardware, I guess most of us will not be here, or will be very tired of it. We may need a major break thru in hardware to be able to run it and make productive use of it. I am continually in search of ways to run it locally and retain the same level of productivity to using it over the cloud. But truth is current state is still not ready for self hosting LLMs.
So I respect your stand point but be prepared that a change for the better is going to take a lot of time.
you can self host and train your own AI on a mini pc if you have enough ram.
You need RAM and GPU which are not cheap, and also lits of disk space to store the model. Thus is no longer a mini PC.
Well, if you say so. People are really emotional about AI, so I'm not going to argue with you or try to educate. Have a nice day.
Maybe you csn give me si.e recommendations I could discover?
lmao, honestly from what i've seen lemmy is very much pro slop -- and it's been quite disheartening. i've mostly just stayed on mastodon lately cause i don't have the bandwidth to fight with people who say "but local models!" ... nah fuck that. LLM's are a racist, fascist, anti-human, anti-social, anti-intellectual, regressive, inefficient, ecoterrorist, counter-revolutionary, class traitor technology. Even with open weights / open models ran locally, it still only reduces peoples capacity to learn, create and build community. It still pushes us as a society apart. There are technologies that can be up lifting and constructive, but this isn't one. There is no reason to chase more lines of code, or more pages in a book -- instead chasing to better understand, better communicate, better organize together. Every "leftist" person on lemmy who is pro local llm's, is just excited about the technology and that leaves very little room for organizing and utilizing this unique time where there could be a non-partisan reason to organize against the oligarchs and fascists who are in power in much of the world right now.
I dabbled with AI usage for a while, ran some local models, would try whatever was the current best for when there was a project that I didn't really want to put the effort into learning about--and I found it was just always regressive and annoying. I'd brick hardware, or my context would get so big that the output would continue to become more sloppy. I started just going back to reading documentation, and it was just always easier. It was always easier to just grep for whatever I needed. Whenever I'd go back to simply trying to understand the problem and just fucking read, I'd feel almost like a haze being lifted. I think this is the point where I realized, most complaints that people have with software etc are already solved issues that most "tech" refuses to implement or has enshitified. So instead of just solving the problem in a predictive / deterministic way, we are instead being sold a technology that will burn incredible amounts of fuel, will requires incredible amounts of resources all to what--search through my email? More slowly than what was developed in the 70's would. Then I read 'Blood in the machine' and 'End times fascism', watched 'ghost in the machine' and read more most and articles... The sheer mass amount of violence and suffering created is unimaginable.
I think my stance is mostly, even without the ethical issues -- what use would this technology even have? Why would I want a computer to do the learning and creating, when I could instead enjoy the work of my friends, and enjoy creating something for others; while building a community. and community is the #1 way to curb fascism. also my computing is more and more evolving into something more similar to permacomputing. My music and art taste has always been more into finding & connecting with artists locally, or at least artists who I can actually interact with and understand. Outsourcing these things to a machine would not bring any joy.
I've been a software engineer for over thirty-five years, with a Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, and a Master's in Machine Learning. I love AI, and can't help but point out how silly all the hate is - even though it gets me nothing but downvotes. People say it's unethical, but what IS ethical? Certainly not the rare earth electronics built in polluting factories we use AI on, nor the likely dirty electricity used to power them. LLM are wonderfully powerful, useful things and I think they should be embraced - at least until Capitalism itself falls, and our civilizations along with it.
I dont need a reason to not like something. For instance, I have never met you IRL or interacted with you online AFAIK, but I dislike you alot.
No idea.
But not everybody is against ai. I am not. I am about regulating and find ethical approach to AI, which is pretty substantially different. I use ai.
But those advocating against will always have a louder mouth. And it will be useless anyway, since ai is here to stay.
|But those advocating against will always have a louder mouth.
Why do you claim this ?
Because of many, only a few complains usually. And the complainers usually have stronger beliefs (true or false, I am not debating here).
|Because of many, only a few complains usually. I don't understand that sentence.
What makes you believe that complainers have stronger beliefs?
They know what is right and wrong. So they complain .
They believe they know, of course. Dowsn mean they actually know right.
That applies for both sides. Why do you think that the anti AI people are louder ?
Man, do you even browse Lemmy or are you just an llm bot?
Every post on AI is filled with anti AI people.
That could show that there are more anti AI people rather than the anti AI people being louder.
I agree, everyone I meet IRL seems to agree on usefulness of AI. Even at work and our clients push forward to using AI to help speed up work. Results (speeding up work) are not always consistent but everyone at work uses it and everyone is happy with it. So it is here to stay.
If you want to convince someone of something, you've got to convince them it is beneficial for them to do or not do what you want. Otherwise, it comes off like you're trying to selfishly impose your own will onto others.
If someone says that AI speeds up their workflow (which they need to live and remain housed), and your response is "but it's bad for moral reasons" you're saying that your moral reasons matter more than the other person's ability to earn money... A better idea would be to try to make them see that an ai subscription is a waste of money and doesn't actually speed up their workflow.